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Open Mic Spotlight: Charles Beadnall

This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun. If you’re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form and submit!

Charles is currently VP of Engineering at GoDaddy. Previously, he was responsible for the ad and personalization platform at Yahoo!, and before that was in charge of infrastructure at Metaweb, and systems architecture at VeriSign. Connect with him on LinkedIn here.

1. What new OpenStack projects do you think will have a significant impact on the cloud market in the next year?

Neutron, Ironic and Anvil. Neutron improves and standardizes the way we manage and interact with networked devices. Ironic completes the compute platform: not all workloads are optimized for virtualization. Anvil does a good job filling the installation gap for large deployments with packaging and standardization of OpenStack itself.

2. What does “open source” mean to you?

Open source means constant re-evaluation and optimization. Leveraging a community to streamline code and prevent the commercial software bloat: Linux vs. Windows.

3. What is your favorite example of OpenStack in production (besides yours, of course!)

Yahoo! since I pulled the team together and they continue to push the envelope with scalability and stability.

4. What do you think is the single most important factor for the success of OpenStack users in 2014?

I was initially involved at a previous company in an evaluation of Eucalyptus, CloudStack and OpenStack. At the time, Eucalyptus was endorsed by Amazon and CloudStack had the largest stable production deployments. OpenStack had an active, growing and inclusive community and high levels of testing. We chose OpenStack at that point and subsequently at GoDaddy as well. Hindsight is 20/20 – the OpenStack community and capabilities have definitely grown faster.